We’ve got a new tradition in our house where the spouse hosts a monthly poker night with some friends from work. I love it; partly because we both love entertaining (even if I’m not there so much – good to be an introvert!), partly because it’s cute and novel (in 18+ years together we’ve never really gone in for gender-divided activities), and partly because they’re a great bunch of guys and I feel happy to help them have fun hanging out.

Brief social commentary/rant: I feel so sad when the spouse tells me how much they sincerely want him to thank me for “letting” them come over and hang out playing cards. If the genders were reversed in that scenario (say, if a gal’s lady friends said “Please thank your husband, again, for letting us come over to play mahjong tonight.”), I get the impression interventions would be planned and divorce attorney and marriage counselor names would be shared pretty quickly. Don’t get me wrong: you’ll never, ever catch me saying men have it worse with gender issues, but as a partner and parent of men, I’ve seen firsthand how they definitely have their own gender traps. None of us is free ’til all of us are, amiright?

Back to baking. I pretty much used this as an excuse to try something I’ve been curious to try for years, literally: cookies patterned with a millefiore type of technique. Much like with decorative glass (and also some hard candies, especially for the holidays), I was keen to see how I might construct a log of cookie dough, with strips of different color dough to build up a pattern that would emerge, in cross section, upon slicing.

In the past, I’d thought of doing the tot’s initial or age. Given the occasion, I opted for a poker chip.

While the “M” is an initial, it’s also good as the roman numeral for 1,000 (live large!). It gets bonus points for being reversible.

I started by sketching out how I would lay out the different color dough in strips, starting with the core design, to create the pattern.

Next time, I would make each color dough separately, adding the color in while mixing the dough to avoid all the kneading once the dough was already done (in case that made it tougher).

Assembling the Core

I then set to layering the colors in strips based on the pattern I designed.

Definitely more “art” than “science” at this point…

I was bummed I’d miscalculated the dough I’d need.

I stopped at the golden rim because I didn’t have enough dough left to make the border I originally designed (that, or I made the cookie log too long and used up the dough that way, which is pretty much the same thing).